It all comes down to this. After the all-inclusive Long List and the wide-ranging, misleadingly titled Slightly Shorter Lists, here — finally — are my favourite albums of 2024, presented in alphabetical order. These are the ones that grabbed me by the collar, wormed their way into my life and kept me coming back repeatedly for more. Your mileage, as always, may vary. As will mine: I can virtually guarantee that if I had to assemble this list again a week from now, it would be different. Such is life. Now, on to the list. And on to another year of new music in 2025:
Ryan Adams
1985 / Heatwave / Prisoners (Live) / Star Sign / Sword & Stone / Blackhole
You can call Ryan Adams a lot of things — and a lot of people have, justifiably or not — but you cannot call him lazy.
For those who haven’t been keeping score at home, the absurdly prolific singer-songwriter and guitarist has released more than 30 albums in the past 23 years. And it seems he was just getting warmed up. While the rest of us were still nursing hangovers and wiping 2023’s sleep out of our eyes on Jan. 1, Adams surprise-released five new albums. Yes, you read that right: Five new full-length releases. To be precise, four new studio sets and one live album. A grand total of 77 songs that run the gamut from ragged roots-rock to moody meditations and even pugilistic punk salvos. What do they have in common? They’re all pretty goddamn fantastic. And he didn’t stop there; before the year was out, he released Blackhole, a long-lost album that he recorded in 2006 and then shelved. Fingers crossed he’s got a similar plan in place for 2025.
Amyl And The Sniffers
Cartoon Darkness
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Recorded with producer Nick Launay at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles — on the same mixing console that captured Nirvana’s Nevermind and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours — the latest Amyl And The Sniffers album is their most diverse yet.
It stretches from classic punk to the glammy strut of hit single U Should Not Be Doing That to the stormy balladry of Big Dreams to pugnacious punk of Jerkin’. The Sniffers are back and back with a vengeance — bigger, brighter, smarter and sharper in every way. “Cartoon Darkness is about climate crisis, war, AI, tiptoeing on the eggshells of politics, and people feeling like they’re helping by having a voice online when we’re all just feeding the data beast of Big Tech, our modern-day god,” says singer Amy Taylor. “It’s about the fact that our generation is spoon-fed information. We look like adults, but we’re children forever cocooned in a shell. We’re all passively gulping up distractions that don’t even cause pleasure, sensation or joy, they just cause numbness. Cartoon Darkness is driving headfirst into the unknown, into this looming sketch of the future that feels terrible but doesn’t even exist yet — a childlike darkness, I don’t want to meet the devil half-way and mourn what we have right now. The future is cartoon, the prescription is dark, but it’s novelty. It’s just a joke. It’s fun.”
Bright Eyes
Five Dice, All Threes
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Five Dice, All Threes is a record of uncommon intensity and tenderness, communal exorcism and personal excavation.
These are, of course, qualities that fans have come to expect from Bright Eyes, nearly three decades into their career. The tight-knit band of Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott tend to operate in distinct sweeping movements: Each unique in its sound and story but unified by a sense of ambition and ever-growing emotional stakes. Even with this rich history behind them, these new songs exude a visceral thrill like nothing they have attempted before. Oberst has always sung in a voice that conveys a sense of life-or-death gravity. At times throughout Five Dice, All Threes, you may feel worried for him; other times, he may seem like the only one with the clarity to get us out of this mess.”
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Wild God
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “I hope the album has the effect on listeners that it’s had on me,” says Nick Cave of Wild God, his 18th album with The Bad Seeds. “It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious. There is never a master plan when we make a record. The records rather reflect back the emotional state of the writers and musicians who played them. Listening to this, I don’t know, it seems we’re happy.”
Across 10 tracks, the band dance between convention and experimentation, taking left-turns and detours that heighten the rich imagery and emotion in Cave’s soul-stirring narratives. It is the sound of a group emboldened by reconnection and taking flight. There are moments that touch fondly upon the Bad Seeds’ past but they are fleeting, and serve only to imbue the relentless and restless forward motion of the band.”
Bob Dylan & The Band
The 1974 Live Recordings
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Bob Dylan’s 1974 Tour marked his first time touring live in eight years and reunited him with The Band — who had become widely renowned in their own right since backing the artist nearly a decade earlier. Booked into arenas for the first time, Bob Dylan and The Band performed 30 dates in 42 days before an average audience of 18,500.
Though they might not have known it at the time, Dylan and The Band were at the vanguard of a new era. Tour ‘74 would help create the template for the major rock tour, and codify many of its shared experiences — from the sight of audiences holding up lighters en masse (as captured in the iconic cover image for Before The Flood) to the bright flash of the house lights during a show’s signal moment, in this case their performance of Like A Rolling Stone. Likewise many songs performed live for the first time on the tour — All Along The Watchtower, Forever Young and the show’s eventual opener-and-closer Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine) — would take on a life of their own. Featuring all professionally recorded shows from the 1974 performances, the full 27-CD collection offers fans 417 previously unreleased tracks — including 133 recordings newly mixed from 16-track tape, and every single surviving soundboard recording.”
Fat Dog
Woof.
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “It’s fucking Fat Dog, baby” — some eight months on since their sprawling debut single King Of The Slugs was released, the sentiment remains strong as the first words of the band’s debut album Woof. are bellowed out by frontman and squadron leader Joe Love (real name: Joe Love).
One of the most exciting breakthrough bands of the past few years, conjurers of the sort of frenzied and wild live shows not seen in the capital for years, and with only a handful of tracks out thus far, Fat Dog have justified the hype witih their brilliant and mind-bending record. When the chaotic south London rabble known as Fat Dog formed, they made two rules: 1 | They were going to be a healthy band who looked after themselves, and 2 | There would be no saxophone in their music. Two simple edicts to live by — and two resolutions long-since broken by the Brixton five-piece. “Yeah, it’s all gone out the window,” says Love.”
Laura Jane Grace
Hole In My Head
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “A musical force since Against Me!’s debut in the late ’90s, Laura Jane Grace has never shied away from themes of political commentary, environmentalism, social critique, and candid self-exploration.
Following the 2012 public announcement of her gender transition, Grace racked up accolades. Against Me! released its most acclaimed record to date, Transgender Dysphoria Blues in 2014, which was followed by an Emmy-nominated 10-episode companion documentary, True Trans with Laura Jane Grace. In 2016, Grace teamed up with journalist Dan Ozzi to co-write her acclaimed memoir Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist. Hole In My Head is Grace’s 12th album and an exciting hallmark in her colorful and extensive career. Recorded at Native Sound in St. Louis with David Beeman and mixed and mastered by Matt Allison (engineer for acts such as Lawrence Arms and Rise Against), the album is a sonic curio cabinet containing multitudes. Hole In My Head features warm ’50s-rock-influenced guitar riffs, saved-for-later lyrics, love letters to St. Louis, dysphoria apparel, and thoughtful reflections on a punk life lived.”
Geordie Greep
The New Sound
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Is The New Sound a tonic for these times? Let’s ask Geordie Greep. “Music can be so much more than learning to play the same as everybody else,” he says. “It can be anything you want. With recording The New Sound, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. Being in a band (Black Midi), we often have this ‘We can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it’s good to do something else, to let go of things.”
Geordie’s debut solo album boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time, walking the line between the ridiculous and brilliant with a teflon-coated aplomb. How the record came about is a thing to marvel at. Over 30 session musicians were involved in its making on two continents. Greep says, “Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They’d never heard anything I’d done before, they were just interested in the demos I’d made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days.”
Hot Mud
Rehab Rock
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “I guess you could say Hot Mud was an alter ego of a man named Muddy Watters. It was a self-proclaimed nickname for his wild intoxicated personality.
Over time Hot Mud completely took over and eventually found himself in very dark places, in his surroundings, and in his own mind. A rocky road (to say the least) thankfully led him to rehab. Hot Mud spent over a year in treatment facilities, where he became sober and healthy. He did recovery work, attended meetings, found hope, and settled into second-stage sober living. He crammed musical instruments, recording equipment, and cameras into this tiny room the size of your mother’s closet. He covered his wall with green bristol board to make trashy music videos. He taught himself basic recording techniques while performing each composition, layering one track at a time onto a broken computer with broken instruments, some found in the rehab facility’s basement. He huddled in the farthest corner of his room and sang as quietly as possible, trying not to bother the other recovering tenants. Hot Mud created a record of songs he wrote during his struggle with addiction and the early stages of recovery. Rehab Rock is packed full of many musical styles and sounds, changing from song to song. Each composition is accompanied by lyrical content that is gritty and real (maybe a little too real) yet occasionally charming, silly, and fun… and it all sounds damn good!”
Brittany Howard
What Now
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “There’s a double meaning to the title of What Now, the revelatory new album from singer-songwriter Brittany Howard. “With the world we’re living in now, it feels like we’re all just trying to hang onto our souls,” says the Nashville-based musician and frontwoman for four-time Grammy winners Alabama Shakes. “Everything seems to be getting more extreme and everyone keeps wondering, ‘What now? What’s next?’ By the same coin, the only constant on this record is you never know what’s going to happen next: Every song is its own aquarium, its own little miniature world built around whatever I was feeling and thinking at the time.”
With five Grammy wins and 16 nominations, Howard follows up her massively acclaimed solo debut Jaime — a 2019 LP that landed on multiple year-end lists — with an album that draws its immense and indelible power from endless unpredictability. Over the course of 12 tracks, Howard brings her singular musicality to a shapeshifting soundscape encompassing everything from psychedelia and dance music to dream-pop and avant-jazz — a fitting backdrop for an album whose lyrics shift from unbridled outpouring to incisive yet radically idealistic commentary on the state of the human condition. At turns galvanizing, cathartic, and wildly soul-expanding, the result is a monumental step forward for one of the most essential artists of our time.”
Idles
Tangk
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Tangk is the righteous and vibrant fifth album from madcap truth-seekers Idles. Pronounced “tank” with a whiff of the “g” — an onomatopoeic reference to the lashing way the band imagined their guitars sounding that has since grown into a sigil for living in love — the record is the band’s most ambitious and striking work yet.
Where Idles were once set on taking the world’s piss, squaring off with strong jaws against the perennially entitled, and exercising personal trauma in real time, they have arrived in this new act to offer the fruits of such perseverance: Love, joy, and indeed gratitude for the mere opportunity of existence. A radical sense of defiant empowerment radiates from Tangk, co-produced by Nigel Godrich, Kenny Beats and Idles guitarist Mark Bowen. Despite his reputation as an incendiary post-punk sparkplug, frontman Joe Talbot sings almost all the feelings inside these 10 songs with hard-earned soul, offering each lusty vow or solidarity plea as a bona fide pop song — that is, a thing for everyone to pass around and share, communal anthems intended for overcoming our grievance. Tangk is a love album — open to anyone who requires something to shout out loud in order to fend off any encroaching sense of the void, now or forever.”
Japandroids
Fate & Alcohol
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Japandroids’ Fate & Alcohol is their fourth and final full-length. Written in part while the duo — drummer-vocalist David Prowse and guitarist-vocalist Brian King — were touring behind their 2017 album Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, the album is at once a return to form and a thrilling step forward, a monument to the chemistry they’ve honed over nearly two decades side by side.
Recorded in Vancouver with longtime collaborator Jesse Gander, Fate & Alcohol finds them pursuing new ways to bottle that same rush — to write songs with the vitality and dynamic interaction of their early material, without sacrificing any of the nuance or ambition that marked Near To The Wild Heart Of Life. “As a band, you always want to feel like you’re progressing while simultaneously preserving what’s unique about you,” King says. “This record combines the energy and abandon of the first two with the storytelling of Near To The Wild Heart Of Life — youthful exuberance but tempered with a point of view, of life lived.”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
Flight b741
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “For their 26th album, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard swap the widescreen concepts of their recent albums for the intimacy of six good friends collaborating on the most bonhomie-laden set they’ve yet committed to wax. For Flight b741, bandleader Stu Mackenzie says King Gizzard “wanted to make something that was primal, instinctual, more ‘from the gut’ — just people in a room, doing what feels right. We wanted to make something fun.”
Tapping into the country-fried ’70s American rock on which they were all raised — along with the ornery garage-rock roots from which their mighty discography sprang — Flight b741 is lightning caught inside a bottle. Across its 10 ragged, glorious barnburners, King Gizzard flesh out rough skeletons of songs with their inspired improvisations, inimitable grooves and a unique pass-the-mic approach to vocals that saw every member of the band raise their voice and sing. “We’re having a lot of fun, but we’re often singing about some pretty heavy shit,” Mackenzie adds, “and probably hitting on some deeper, more universal themes than usual. It’s not a sci-fi record, it’s about life and stuff. But the record is like a really fun weekend with your mates, you know? Like, proper fun.”
NOTE: The band also released about three dozen live albums in 2024 — a complete chronicle of all their North American performances. I listened to them all. And enjoyed them all. So they also belong this list, but I didn’t include all the titles because they would take up a ton of space.
MJ Lenderman
Manning Fireworks
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “No one paid too much attention when Jake Lenderman recorded Boat Songs, his third album released under the name MJ Lenderman. Before he cut it, after all, he was a 20-year-old guitarist working at an ice cream shop in his mountain hometown of Asheville, N.C.
But as the pandemic took hold just as he turned 21, Lenderman — then making more money through state unemployment than he had serving scoops — enjoyed the sudden luxury of free time. Every day, he would read, paint, and write; every night, he and his roommates, bandmates and best friends would drink and jam in their rental home, singing whatever came to mind over their collective racket. Some of those lines stuck around the next morning, slowly becoming 2021’s self-made Ghost Of Your Guitar Solo and then 2022’s Boat Songs, recorded in a studio for a grand. Boat Songs became one of that year’s breakthrough LPs, a ramshackle set of charms and chuckles. Suddenly, people were paying a lot of attention to what Lenderman might make next. The answer is Manning Fireworks. Coproducing it with pal and frequent collaborator Alex Farrar, Lenderman plays nearly every instrument. It is not only his fourth full-length but also a remarkable development in his story as an incredibly incisive singer-songwriter, whose propensity for humour always points to some uneasy, disorienting darkness.
Osees
Sorcs 80
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “This album was a self-imposed ambitious project for us,” says Osees singer-guitarist, songwriter and ringleader John Dwyer. “Something to kick in the creative flow. The last few years, having been a challenging time in general, felt like a good time for a pivot. The last two albums were so guitar and keyboard-centric; I wanted a weird and fun set of parameters for us to work with. I demo’d everything at home on cassette four-track (harkening back to simpler times) using drum loops, and just had at it ’til I had a pile of ‘songs.’
“Tom (Dolas) and I chose one sound each using synths and created a range of three octaves of that sample, then loaded them into Roland SPD-SX samplers and learned the transcribed songs using drum sticks. The idea was to change the way we wrote and to have four people along the front of the stage essentially playing percussion. So no guitar, no keys. As we were recording I kept thinking how the sounds, when paired up, sounded a bit like brass. So we added a saxophone horn section to round out the horniness of the sound with a bit of reedy bell tones. Thanks to Cansfis Foote and Brad Caulkins on tenor and baritone saxophones. (It’s) sort of a Dexy’s Midnight Runners meets Von LMO meets The Flesh Eaters meets The Screamers kinda punk junk. Poppy and hooky, heavy at times. Sort of vacuous and maybe a bit sci-fi in sound. Boneheaded in riff and heady in lyrics. Recorded at Stu-Stu-Studio by me on eight track 1/4-inch tape. So pretty hot and raw.”
Daniel Romano’s Outfit
Too Hot To Sleep
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In order to bring about the good song, there is a certain amount of magic to be summoned,” says Daniel Romano. “Though there are a variety of ways to achieve it, allow me now to break down one of my favourite methods: Without food, take to your post with the hungry wonder of the morning. Getting down to it, allow everything to begin slowly — thought, breath, moment — until you’re buried, little by little in a celestial blackness where all common ideas dissolve into ash and all that didn’t serve you is gone. It’s in this original darkness that the virtues of your heart begin to ignite.”
Come hither dialecticians! Come into the darkness to discover light! Creativity is technique, study, and process, and above all, a commitment, to the self and the self’s relationship to the world. So, too it is an opening, or the result of an opening, to the gifts the world and the world cosmos bring. One conceives as one receives. Magic, yes, but magic summoned actively.”
Billy Strings
Highway Prayers
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Highway Prayers, the new studio album from Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and musician Billy Strings, was produced by Strings and Jon Brion (Fiona Apple, Mac Miller, Aimee Mann).
The album includes 20 original songs including the first single Leadfoot. Written by Strings, the song features Strings on vocals, banjo, bass, steel guitar, EBow electric guitar and 1972 Chevrolet Chevelle, along with Matt Chamberlain on drums. Recorded in Los Angeles and Nashville, the album features Strings and his longtime band — Billy Failing (banjo, vocals), Royal Masat (bass, vocals), Jarrod Walker (mandolin, vocals) and Alex Hargraves (fiddle) — as well as additional contributions from Brion (bass, drums, percussion), Chamberlain (drums), Jerry Douglas (dobro), Jason Carter (fiddle), Lindsay Lou (backing vocals), Nathaniel Smith (cello), Taneka Samone (backing vocals), Cory Henry (piano), Peter “Madcat” Ruth (harmonica, jaw harp) and Victor Furtado (clawhammer banjo).”
Various Artists
Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “As always in my songs, the themes are all there — transcendence, positivity and global unity through music,” says Jesse Malin. “This is what I love to do, and I’m going to do everything I can to keep doing it.”
Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin is both a tribute and benefit album, with all proceeds to Malin’s Sweet Relief artist fund. “This record is also a dynamite and long-overdue awareness project, non-stop star time in vigorously personal twists on behalf of a great rock ’n’ roll songbook,” writes longtime supporter David Fricke. Long a contributor to other people’s causes, Malin is grateful to all the musicians who have rallied around him, including Bruce Springsteen, Billie Joe Armstrong, Lucinda Williams and Elvis Costello, The Hold Steady, Tommy Stinson, Alison Mossheart with the late, great Wayne Kramer, Tom Morello, Counting Crows, Dinosaur Jr., The Wallflowers, Spoon, Susanna Hoffs, Frank Turner and Rancid, among others.”
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Woodland
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Woodland is the 10th studio album from dritically acclaimed Americana songbirds Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings — and their first full-length since 2020’s Grammy-winning all-covers collection, All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone).
Named for and recorded at Welch and Rawlings’ own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, the 10-song set features both full-band sessions and intimate duet performances, all tied together by the duo’s signature old-time sound and evocative lyricism. Opening cut and lead single Empty Trainload of Sky provides a languid taster of the starkly vivid emotionality to come. “Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last 20-some years,” the duo say in a press release. “The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, grief, destruction, permanence. Now.”
Jack White
No Name
No artwork. No credits. No lyric sheet. No press release. No photos. No song titles. No singles. No videos. No publicity. No problem. Not for Jack White, anyway.
For those who still haven’t heard, the innovative, iconoclastic indie-rock singer-songwriter, guitarist and entrepreneur surprise-released his latest album. As you might expect, he did it in his own unique way — by having staff at his Third Man Records stores in Nashville, Detroit and London give it away free with any purchase. Basically, it looks like a test pressing: A white vinyl record in a plain white sleeve, with No Name stamped on one side of the plain white label. The LP’s only distinguishing feature: The vinyl has Heaven And Hell etched into the run-out groove on one side, and Black And Blue on the other (more on that in a minute). It is arguably one of the coolest things White has ever done. Which is saying something. It is also arguably one of the best albums he’s ever made. Which is saying a whole lot more. Of course, for my money, White has never made a truly bad album. Certainly not with The White Stripes. Nor with his on-again / off-again / supergroups / side-projects The Dead Weather and The Raconteurs. And not even as a solo artist. Do I like some of them more than others? Sure. But I don’t like many of them more than No Name. If you like White and his loudest, heaviest and rawest, you’ll likely feel the same.”
Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention
Whiskey a Go Go, 1968
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The hand-scrawled ad in the L.A. Free Press — an open invitation to Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention’s all-night affair at L.A.’s historic Whisky a Go Go — laid things out in black and white as to what Zappa and the band’s intentions were for that soon-to-be historic evening. It read: “The Mothers of Invention cordially invite you to join them on Tuesday, July 23, 1968 when they will be taking over the Whisky a Go Go for 5 full hours of unprecedented merriment, which will be secretly recorded for an upcoming record album. Dress optional. Starting sometime in the evening. R.S.V.D.T.”
The show was billed on the Whisky marquee as “Mothers Of Invention – Recording Session,” and thus, Zappa had indeed recorded the entire evening’s aural festivities with the intention of releasing an album. That project never quite fully materialized — until now. Whisky a Go Go, 1968, the latest provocative live collection to be released from The Vault, will be released June 21. Produced by Ahmet Zappa and Joe Travers, this extensive collection, some 55-plus years in the making, compiles everything The Mothers of Invention played across their three sets that night, complete and newly remixed.”
